You can visit The last of us‘ rising star at the Calgary Zoo, and no, it’s not Pedro Pascal or Bella Ramsey. As it turns out, the giraffe scene in the HBO series, adapted directly from the games, was created with a real giraffe and filmed inside the Calgary Zoo. The zoo is short on giraffes, but Nabo, a 12-year-old male Masai giraffe who is the tallest of the group at 17 feet, was cast in the role.
The relevant scene is one of the most important in the video game and in the show; is the culmination of hours of unrelenting violence, a moment of calm before Joel (Pascal) and Ellie (Ramsey) face more than The last of usPatented brutality. HBO set the scene in the ninth episode of the game, the finale of its first season. Ellie is recovering from a particularly traumatic encounter with a group of cannibals, stripped of her usual wit and humor. He hits the giraffe at just the right moment – a reminder of the beauty and power of nature. It was important to the HBO production team to get this moment right, which meant using a real giraffe.
Image: HBO via HBO Max
“What I quickly learned after researching the game was how important this moment is to the entire story of the game,” says location director Matt Palmer at HBO. Making of The Last of Us documentary film. “Yes, you can create a giraffe with visual effects, but it’s not the same.”
Of course, there were some people on social media who thought the giraffe was all fake, all CGI, as so many on-screen animals are these days. Others have gone so far as to criticize the CGI, not knowing that the giraffe is an animal actor, Rapo. Maybe tripping people up: It is was many visual effects used to achieve the scene.
HBO took over the production of The last of us to the Calgary Zoo to film the scene. The Hub enclosure was fitted with blue panels to make a blue screen. Installation took about a month, says product designer John Paino. Variety, so the giraffe could feel comfortable in the changed environment and with many new people, including Pascal and Ramsey, feeding the giraffe on the scene. And it has an effect; even Ramsey said in the documentary that being so close to a huge animal was almost “spiritual.” So yes, the giraffe is real, but the environment isn’t: it’s a CGI background directed by visual effects supervisor Alex Wang.
“That’s the Hollywood magic of Alex isolating the giraffes and putting them on our set,” Paino said. “That was probably the most complicated VFX set, scenery and location creation I’ve ever worked on.”